Silent Barrack

The large-scale installations of Uruguayan-born artist Rimer Cardillo address issues of history, memory, spiritualism, and ritual. Silent Barrack’s monumentality suggests a colonial altarpiece, while its shrine-like aesthetic implies an unknown ceremonial function. Cardillo constructs his assemblages out of a wide range of symbolically-meaningful materials which he personally collects. The battered sink was recovered from an abandoned industrial building which housed Cardillo’s New York studio, while the ring of soil refers to the artist’s displaced homeland, which he left in 1979 to escape an oppressive dictatorship. Cardillo’s complex relationship with Uruguay is represented by the amorphous form on Silent Barrack’s canvas: its corpse-like shape recalled for the artist childhood memories of a slaughtered lamb, as well as the political torture and disappearance of a close friend during the dictatorship.